This is one live data recovery case study solved by Dolphin engineer for one Dolphin users from Colombia. The engineer helped the user to recover the lost data from this ST2000DM001-9YN164 hard drive, new Seagate F3 hard drive.

When users tried to scan the hard drive, the disk was full of bad sectors. This can be caused by translator issue, bad sector issue, single head damage issue, contaminated head issue, encryption issue. Next the user connected the COM cable and Seagate COM connector, go to the COM terminal and users getting the following output:

By pressing CTRL+Z, users can enter F3 T>. However, trying a series of common commands used commonly to handle Seagate cases, such as clearing g-list, clearing smart, repairing common failures and regenerating translators didn’t fix the cases and the full disk bad sectors remained.

The drive didn’t output any clicking noises and the engineer continued the firmware repair.